Arthur Sale

We are pleased to announce that the cataloguing of the Arthur Sale collection has been completed.

The book titles are now available to view on the University of Cambridge’s online library catalogue, ‘idiscover’. Arthur Sale (1912-2000) was a Fellow-Commoner and teacher of English at Magdalene College, and a portion of his library now resides in the Old Library owing to the kind generosity of Sale’s family.

Sale was a highly popular educator who taught several well-known alumni of Magdalane College, including Bamber Gascoigne, Alan Rusbridger and the television journalist John Simpson. Rusbridger wrote Sale’s obituary for the Guardian, describing him as a ‘brilliant, enthralling, inspiring teacher.’

The Arthur Sale collection primarily focuses on 19th century literature, though it includes a small number of works which pre- and post-date this period. Cataloguing the collection allows a close study of each book, and below is a selection of interesting items discovered during this process.

This edition of Love and Freindship [sic] by Jane Austen also includes other works she wrote as a young woman between 1787 and 1793. These pieces are bound into three notebooks collectively known as the Juvenilia. The publication of this book in 1922 by Chatto and Windus marked the first time the second Juvenilia notebook was made available to the public, while the manuscript was still in the ownership of a descendent of Jane Austen’s elder brother. The manuscript is now in the British Library.[i] The charming illustrations reproduced on the book’s pastedowns are by Austen’s sister Cassandra, who painted historical figures in watercolours to accompany Jane’s satirical work The History of England, written when she was fifteen.[ii]

This set of Robert Southey’s poetry was owned formerly by Southey’s friend Reverend John Neville White, as documented by the inscriptions in the volumes. Correspondence between the two men appears in The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, edited by Rev. Charles Southey (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849), which is freely available online.

Most of the books in the collection are bound in publisher’s bindings, which rose to prominence in the 19th century.  These bindings were commissioned by the book’s publisher and mass-produced, but this did not prevent decorative elements from appearing on the binding. This copy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works, full-bound in dark blue cloth with decorative gold elements, is one such example.

Our final chosen item is a pressed flower found in the book, Rural tales, ballads and songs by Robert Bloomfield.  Pressing flowers was a very popular pastime in the 19th century, but this is the first time a flower has been found among the Old Library’s books.  It may have been placed there by one Augustus Gooch, a former owner of the book.

By Catherine Sutherland
Special Collections Librarian

References

[i] Austen, J. (2006) ‘Introduction’, in P. Sabor (ed.) Juvenilia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen), pp. xxiii–lxvii.

[ii] Ibid.